The names of these twelve zodiacal constellations are familiar to us all:—
| English Names. | Latin Names. |
| Ram | Aries |
| Bull | Taurus |
| Twins | Gemini |
| Crab | Cancer |
| Lion | Leo |
| Virgin | Virgo |
| Scales | Libra |
| Scorpion | Scorpio |
| Archer | Sagittarius |
| Capricorn | Capricornus |
| Water-Bearer | Aquarius |
| Fishes | Pisces. |
Strange to say, we cannot tell with any certainty where, when, or by whom, this ancient series of constellations was devised and named. The earliest full description which we possess is by a Greek poet of the 4th century b.c., Aratus. A line from the prologue to his “Phenomena” was quoted by St. Paul in his address to the Athenians on Mars’ Hill.
“From Zeus we lead the strain, he whom mankind Ne’er leave unhymned; of Zeus all public ways, All haunts of men are full, and full the sea And harbours; and of Zeus all stand in need. We are his offspring;[8] and he, mild to man, Gives favouring signs and rouses us to toil, Calling to mind life’s wants; when clods are best For plough and mattock, when the time is ripe For planting vines and sowing seeds he tells. Since he himself hath fixed in heaven these signs, The stars dividing; and throughout the year Stars he provides to indicate to men The seasons’ course, that all things duly grow.”[9]
But Aratus did not know who had invented the names of the star-groups which he describes. “Some man of yore,” he supposes,
“A nomenclature thought of and devised, And forms sufficient found. For men could not Or tell or learn the separate names of all, Since everywhere are many, size and tint Of multitudes the same, but all are drawn around. So thought he good to make the stellar groups, That each by other lying orderly, They might display their forms. And thus the stars At once took names and rise familiar now.”[10]
It is, to say the least, exceedingly doubtful, whether the naming of star-groups was so promptly carried out by one individual, especially as Aratus’ poem includes, besides the twelve zodiacal constellations, thirty-six others, which contain all the bright stars of the sky except those too far south to be seen in the temperate regions of our northern hemisphere. The spaces thus left blank were afterwards filled up, chiefly in the 17th and 18th centuries of our era, and the regions round the South Pole are now crowded with a mixture of birds and scientific instruments; but the names and the figures of the traditional forty-eight constellations still find undisputed places on our globes and star-maps.
Some of these figures are very strange and suggestive. We have a maiden with wings, a centaur shooting arrows, a flying horse, a water-snake with a crow and a cup on its back, a charioteer with a goat on his shoulder, a man strangling a serpent, another pouring water into the mouth of a fish, and a strange beast like a goat with a fish’s tail. All had their meaning, doubtless, to their originators, but to us they are cryptic characters, hard to decipher. Among the zodiacal constellations only one is obvious, Libra the Scales, the sign in which the sun is when days and nights are perfectly balanced in length; but this is comparatively recent, for Aratus and his contemporaries give in its place the Claws of the Scorpion, the latter being an enormous monster extending over the space of two asterisms. The figures may have been religious symbols, or an illustration of some myth concerning the sun’s yearly course, or each of the twelve may have indicated the weather or the occupation suitable to the month it represented. The ear of corn in the hand of the Virgin, and the juxtaposition of three watery figures in Capricornus, Aquarius, and Pisces, suggest the latter explanation. Many different ideas probably played a part in the origin of these mysterious constellation-forms. The Greeks, and after them the Romans, when adopting the old constellations, sometimes adopted also the old myths which still clung about them; sometimes they ascribed legends to them from their own mythology. Thus, the kneeling figure with his foot upon a dragon, became and remains the hero Hercules, although Aratus only describes him as a man toiling at some unknown task, and says he is called simply the Kneeler. Successive generations of astronomers altered some of the figures, but probably only to a slight extent.[11]
The poem of Aratus enjoyed an immense popularity in classical times and throughout the Middle Ages, and no doubt helped to stereotype the forms whose origin was already forgotten when he wrote. He was not an astronomer, however, and the poem is only a popular paraphrase of a lost work by Eudoxus. This Greek astronomer had lived a hundred years earlier, and it is thought that he himself copied from an older source. The attempt to discover this source has been the object of many ingenious conjectures, and much research among ancient monuments and writings. Some of the old constellations are met with in Isaiah and Job, in Homer, on tablets found at Nineveh, and an immense antiquity is sometimes claimed for them. Dupuis, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, thought he had conclusively proved that the figures of the zodiac were designed in Egypt 15,000 years ago![12] Miss Plunkett, in her “Ancient Calendars and Constellations” assigns them to the seventh millenium before Christ.